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Global Warming was just one issue The Club of Rome (TCOR) targeted in its campaign to reduce world population. In 1993 the Club’s co-founder, Alexander King with Bertrand Schneider wrote The First Global Revolution stating,
“The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”
They believe all these problems are created by humans but exacerbated by a growing population using technology. “Changed attitudes and behavior” basically means what it has meant from the time Thomas Malthus raised the idea the world was overpopulated. He believed charity and laws to help the poor were a major cause of the problem and it was necessary to reduce population through rules and regulations. TCOR ideas all ended up in the political activities of the Rio 1992 conference organized by Maurice Strong (a TCOR member) under the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
The assumptions and objectives became the main structure of Agenda 21, the master plan for the 21st Century. The global warming threat was confronted at Rio through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It was structured to predetermine scientific proof that human CO2 was one contribution of the “common enemy”.
The IPCC was very successful. Despite all the revelations about corrupted science and their failed predictions (projections) CO2 remains central to global attention about energy and environment. For example, several websites, many provided by government, list CO2 output levels for new and used cars. Automobile companies work to build cars with lower CO2 output and, if for no other reason than to appear green, use it in advertising. The automotive industry, which has the scientists to know better, collectively surrenders to eco-bullying about CO2. They are not alone. They get away with it because they pass on the unnecessary costs to a befuddled “trying to do the right thing” population.
TCOR applied Thomas Malthus’s claim of a race to exhaustion of food to all resources. Both Malthus and COR believe limiting population was mandatory. Darwin took a copy of Malthus’s Essay on Population with him and remarked on its influence on his evolutionary theory in his Beagle journal in September 1838. The seeds of distortion about overpopulation were sown in Darwin’s acceptance of Malthus’s claims.
Paul Johnson’s biography of Charles Darwin comments on the contradiction between Darwin’s scientific methods and his acceptance of their omission in Malthus.
Malthus’s aim was to discourage charity and reform the existing poor laws, which, he argued, encourage the destitute to breed and so aggravated the problem. That was not Darwin’s concern. What struck him was the contrast between geometrical progression (breeding) and arithmetical progression (food supplies). Not being a mathematician he did not check the reasoning and accuracy behind Malthus’s law… in fact, Malthus’s law was nonsense. He did not prove it. He stated it. What strikes one reading Malthus is the lack of hard evidence throughout. Why did this not strike Darwin? A mystery. Malthus’s only “proof” was the population expansion of the United States.
There was no point at which Malthus’s geometrical/arithmetical rule could be made to square with the known facts. And he had no reason whatsoever to extrapolate from the high American rates to give a doubling effect every 25 years everywhere and in perpetuity.
He swallowed Malthusianism because it fitted his emotional need, he did not apply the tests and deploy the skepticism that a scientist should. It was a rare lapse from the discipline of his profession. But it was an important one.
Darwin’s promotion of Malthus undoubtedly gave the ideas credibility they didn’t deserve. Since then the Malthusian claim has dominated science, social science and latterly environmentalism. Even now many who accept the falsity of global warming due to humans continue to believe overpopulation is a real problem.
Overpopulation was central in all TCOR’s activities. Three books were important to their message, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968) and Ecoscience: Population, Resources and Environment (1977) co-authored with John Holdren, Obama’s Science Czar, and Meadows et al., Limits to Growth, published in 1972 that anticipated the IPCC approach of computer model predictions (projections). The latter wrote
If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years.
Here is what the TCOR web site says about the book.
They created a computing model which took into account the relations between various global developments and produced computer simulations for alternative scenarios. Part of the modelling were different amounts of possibly available resources, different levels of agricultural productivity, birth control or environmental protection.
They estimated the current amount of a resource, determined the rate of consumption, and added an expanding demand because of increasing industrialization and population growth to determine, with simple linear trend analysis, that the world was doomed.
Economist Julian Simon challenged TCOR and Ehrlich’s assumptions.
In response to Ehrlich’s published claim that “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000” – a proposition Simon regarded as too silly to bother with – Simon countered with “a public offer to stake US$10,000 … on my belief that the cost of non-government-controlled raw materials (including grain and oil) will not rise in the long run.”
Simon proposed,
You could name your own terms: select any raw material you wanted – copper, tin, whatever – and select any date in the future, “any date more than a year away,” and Simon would bet that the commodity’s price on that date would be lower than what it was at the time of the wager.
John Holdren selected the materials and the time. Simon won the bet.
Global warming used the idea that CO2 would increase to harmful levels because of increasing industrialization and expanding populations. The political manipulation of climate science was linked to development and population control in various ways. Here are comments from a PBS interview with Senator Tim Wirth in response to the question, “What was it in the late 80s, do you think, that made the issue [of global warming] take off?” He replied,
I think a number of things happened in the late 1980s. First of all, there were the [NASA scientist Jim] Hansen hearings [in 1988]. … We had introduced a major piece of legislation. Amazingly enough, it was an 18-part climate change bill; it had population in it, conservation, and it had nuclear in it. It had everything that we could think of that was related to climate change. … And so we had this set of hearings, and Jim Hansen was the star witness.
Wikipedia says about Wirth,
In the State Department, he worked with Vice President Al Gore on global environmental and population issues, supporting the administration’s views on global warming. A supporter of the proposed Kyoto Protocol Wirth announced the U.S.’s commitment to legally binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions.
Gore chaired the 1988 “Hansen” Senate Hearing and was central to the promotion of population as basic to all other problems. He led the US delegation to the September 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo Egypt.
That conference emerged from Rio 1992 where they linked population to all other supposed problems.
Explicitly integrating population into economic and development strategies will both speed up the pace of sustainable development and poverty alleviation and contribute to the achievement of population objectives and an improved quality of life of the population.
This theme was central to Rio+20 held in June 2012 and designed to re-emphasize Rio 1992.
The Numbers
The world is not overpopulated. That fallacy is perpetuated in all environmental research, policy and planning including global warming and latterly climate change. So what are the facts about world population?
The US Census Bureau provides a running estimate of world population. It was 6,994,551,619 on February 15, 2012. On October 30, 2011 the UN claimed it passed 7 billion; the difference is 5,448,381. This is more than the population of 129 countries of the 242 listed by Wikipedia. It confirms most statistics are crude estimates, especially those of the UN who rely on individual member countries, yet no accurate census exists for any of them
Population density is a more meaningful measure. Most people are concentrated in coastal flood plains and deltas, which are about 5 percent of the land. Compare Canada, the second largest country in the world with approximately 35.3 million residents estimated in 2013 with California where an estimated 37.3 million people lived in 2010. Some illustrate the insignificance of the density issue by putting everyone in a known region. For example, Texas at 7,438,152,268,800 square feet divided by the 2012 world population 6,994,551,619 yields 1063.4 square feet per person. Fitting all the people in an area is different from them being able to live there. Most of the world is unoccupied by humans.
Population geographers separate ecumene, the inhabited area, from non-ecumene the uninhabited areas. The distribution of each changes over time because of technology, communications and food production capacity. Many of these changes deal with climate controls. Use of fire and clothing allowed survival in colder regions, while irrigation offset droughts and allowed settlement in arid regions. Modern environmentalists would likely oppose all of these touted evolutionary advances.
Ironically The Fallacious Problem is The Solution
It all sounds too familiar in the exploitation of science for a political and personal agenda. But there is an even bigger tragedy because the development the TCOR and IPCC condemn is actually the solution.
All of the population predictions Ehrlich and others made were wrong, but more important and damning was they ignored another pattern that was identified in 1929 and developed over the same period as the Mathusian claims. It is known as the Demographic Transition.
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It shows and statistics confirm, population declines as nations industrialize and the economy grows. It is so dramatic in developed countries that the population pyramid results in insufficient young people to support the massively expensive social programs for the elderly. Some countries offset this with migration, but they are simply creating other problems. Countries that don’t allow or severely limit migration such as Japan face completely different problems. Some countries offer incentives for having more than two children, such as the announcement by Vladimir Putin in Russia. China took draconian, inhuman, steps by limiting families to one child. The irony, although there is nothing funny about it, is they are now the largest producer of CO2 and their economy booms. If they had simply studied the demographic transition and let things take a normal course the tragedies already incurred and yet to unfold could have been avoided.
The world is not overpopulated. Malthus began the idea suggesting the population would outgrow the food supply. Currently food production is believed sufficient to feed 25 billion people and growing. The issue is that in the developing world some 60 percent of production never makes it to the table. Developed nations cut this figure to 30 percent primarily through refrigeration. In their blind zeal those who brought you the IPCC fiasco cut their teeth on the technological solution to this problem – better and cheaper refrigeration. The CFC/ ozone issue was artificially created to ban CFCs and introduce global control through the Montreal Protocol. It, like the Kyoto Protocol was a massive, expensive, unnecessary solution to a non-existent problem.
TCOR and later UNEP’s Agenda 21 adopted and expanded the Malthusian idea of overpopulation to all resources making it the central tenet of all their politics and policies. The IPCC was set up to assign the blame of global warming and latterly climate change on human produced CO2 from an industrialized expanding population. They both developed from false assumptions, used manipulated data and science, which they combined into computer models whose projections were, not surprisingly, wrong. The result is the fallacy of global warming due to human CO2 is a subset built on the fallacy of overpopulation.
Pat Frank says:
January 5, 2014 at 7:20 pm
Steve B, letting some land lie fallow is the system Holland and England abandoned in favor of crop rotation. Crop rotation uses all the fields all the time, with different crops rotating through them. Hence the name: crop rotation.
Pat,
Rotating from a corn crop into a simultaneous planting of oats and alfalfa in the following spring produces a crop of annual oats AND establishes alfalfa as a perennial crop for the next 3 years or so. The alfalfa fields produce 3 cuttings of haylage or baled hay per year while the soil is not tilled and the alfalfa sod remains undisturbed. The alfalfa roots fix nitrogen in the soil for the 3 year duration while the soil ‘lays fallow’. It’s the best of both methods!
MtK
Great article Dr. Ball, good to address this subject because Agenda 21 is currently rolled out in Europe and the financial crises aimed to eliminate the Middle Class and transform the consumer society is part of the plot. That’s why your article and Matt Ridley’s “When idea’s have sex” make such a convincing counter argument.
Let there be no misunderstanding here: the establishment is waging war on the world population and we’re quickly entering the phase where we arrive in a “it’s them or us” situation.
This is not a joke. Also visit http://green-agenda.com
Roger Dewhurst says:
“Breeding to maximise population favours the wealthy but that is all.”
Where to begin? How about like this: that statement is flat wrong.
As David Friedman points out above, a growing population creates wealth for everyone. The faster the US population grew, the more equally the wealth was allocated. As population growth began to slow, wealth became more concentrated in the “top 1%”.
The more people there are, the better off everyone is. There is more opportunity. There are more jobs. People are happier in general. You can observe that in numerous countries, and you do not need to limit your observations to North and South Korea, or the old East & West Germany.
The current US government is deliberately implementing policies that make the population more miserable and poor. That callous policy is designed to give the incumbents more political power. The fact that they point to their opponents with endless accusations of what they themselves are doing is simply a strategy; a tactic. They are formenting unhappiness, in the hopes of cashing in on the very unhappiness they are creating. All you have to do is look, and you can see it.
Rud Istvan,
The hydrocarbons on Titan are renewable geochemical ones, not biological. The same is true here on Earth, where hydrocarbons are a crucial source of food and energy for many living things.
Microbes have been consuming hydrocarbons for billions of years–long before the evolution of the photosynthetic organisms required for producing “fossil fuels.”
Did you ever wonder where the diamondoids in crude oil come from?
quote:
= = = =
“We were wrong on peak oil. There’s enough to fry us all
A boom in oil production has made a mockery of our predictions.”
– George Monbiot
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/02/peak-oil-we-we-wrong
= = = =
Pat Frank says:
January 5, 2014 at 7:46 pm
. . . Proven gas reserves are up two-fold since 1980. Our known oil reserves are about 2.5x higher now than they were then. Here’s a Julian Simon-like suggestion: oil will never become expensive. Neither will energy. Unless ideologues manage to squelch technology by deliberately regulating it into oblivion.
————————————————————-
Reserves are not the issue, and proved reserves are only a small fraction of the known resources in any case. Production rate is the issue. Never is a long time. Unless we find out that crude oil is a renewable resource, I would say that exponential growth in production rate won’t continue indefinitely on a finite planet. And when growth stops it is likely that prices will increase. Interestingly enough, they only have to increase enough to cause demand to cease to increase and you might not say that it was “expensive” yet.
@Rodger Dewhurst 7:50.
Sorry I would disagree, government cannot do that, obtain the best standard of living on average…without picking winners and losers,bending the rules, in rebalancing, somebody pays.
The only function of government is to maintain the illusion that we have civilization.
All other activities are theft by government AKA kleptocracy.
Other than maintaining the basic institutions of law, order,equality before the law, property rights (defence), government destroys more wealth than it is worth.
A simple comparison between tribal societies, where you only build what you can protect and trust is local, self defence a large cost, contrasted to western civilization, where we can share extra wealth because we cooperate with strangers.
The expectation of the same rules being applied to all and enforced by those elected and appointed paid actors who begged for these opportunities to play the roles.
Government is a morality play, which must perform to convince the majority of us citizens that civilization exists.
Currently the whole show is in the hands of the B shift and it shows, when people stop believing, civilization vanishes.
When the cost of government exceeds the benefit of civilization, tribalism become cost effective.
Roger Dewhurst says:
January 5, 2014 at 7:50 pm
“When there are more jobs than people… When there are more people than jobs..”
So, jobs are a finite resource which simply spring out of the ground spontaneously?
Steve from Rockwood says:
Where I live is desert, and we’re doing fine.
The average annual rainfall here is just 14 inches. I’ve lived in other places where rainfall was just 4 inches.
Now, to the unimaginative man, most of the world is uninahabitable.
To the rest of us, it is pure opportunity, as long as you and other unimaginatives don’t prevent us from taking the challenge.
Henry Ford is quoted as saying: “Whether you believe you can, or you can’t, you are right.”
There is the matter that mineral resources are limited. I think it is better to have more time before we have to mine landfills.
Another matter is that worldwide on average, cultures who believe in being fruitful, multiplying, and outpopulating other cultures tend to have a smaller percentage of their children becoming scientists or engineers, and a larger percentage becoming soldiers or chronically unemployed. They also, on worldwide average, have a smaller percentage of their children getting married.
And as I have seen it, nations believing in faster population growth tend to be more war-like, and I have seen warfare being done in ways to destroy or steal food shipments in faster-population-growth areas, especially in Africa.
There must be a different Malthus because the sterilized version I see here of an irrational Malthus is a lot different to the ideological one which proclaimed it was a natural law that people die of starvation and why an aggressive tyranny is the driver of life .
Until Malthus came along,evolutionary geology and biology was written by the fossil record in rock strata,a delicate process developed by people like Steno and Smith. Then Darwin,as typical of his age,focused in on a social commentary of Malthus and a one-eyes view of evolutionary biology and ran with it in much the same way they try to squeeze planetary climate through a minor atmospheric gas.
Even when shown the actual texts and where the reasoning of Malthus leads , and it is more a justification for one nation’s dominance over another, people today still retain a one dimensional view when they really,really shouldn’t. I am sure Malthus would be pleased to see his work cleaned up by contemporaries to appear rational but history itself bears the irrationality of it all. I have yet to see any higher reasoning applied to any terrestrial science or astronomy because people can rewrite history when it suits or assert anything and everything without physical considerations.
The perceptions of the historical and technical details are so narrow and designed to promote an individual agenda such as Darwin came up with evolutionary biology that the wider world knows literally nothing about the non aggressive approach of Smith and Steno but boy,are the consequences grave with the narrow view –
“One day something brought to my recollection Malthus’s “Principles of Population,” which I had read about twelve years before. I thought of his clear exposition of “the positive checks to increase”—disease, accidents, war, and famine—which keep down the population of savage
races to so much lower an average than that of civilized peoples. It then occurred to me that these causes or their equivalents are continually acting in the case of animals also.. because in every generation the inferior would inevitably be killed off and the superior would remain—that is, the fittest would survive.… The more I thought over it the more I became convinced that I had at length found the long-sought-for law of nature that solved the problem of the origin of species.” Charles Darwin
“Till at length the whole territory, from the confines of China to the shores of the Baltic, was peopled by a various race of Barbarians, brave, robust, and enterprising, inured to hardship, and delighting in war. Some tribes maintained their independence. Others ranged themselves under the standard of some barbaric chieftain who led them to victory after victory, and what was of more importance, to regions abounding in corn, wine, and oil, the long wished for consummation, and great reward of their labours. An Alaric, an Attila, or a Zingis Khan, and the chiefs around them, might fight for glory, for the fame of extensive conquests, but the true cause that set in motion the great tide of northern emigration, and that continued to propel it
till it rolled at different periods against China, Persia, italy, and even Egypt, was a scarcity of food, a population extended beyond the means of supporting it.” Thomas Malthus
http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~stephan/malthus/malthus.3.html
“Without consideration of traditions and prejudices, Germany must find the courage to gather our people and their strength for an advance along the road that will lead this people from its present restricted living space to new land and soil, and hence also free it from the danger of vanishing from the earth or of serving others as a slave nation. The National Socialist Movement must strive to eliminate the disproportion between our population and our area—viewing this latter as a source of food as well as a basis for power politics—between our
historical past and the hopelessness of our present impotence” Mein Kampf
As part of my Masters in Mineral Economics I read the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth and “Scarcity and Growth” by Barnett and Morse. The latter effectively debunked the CoR’s efforts. No more need to the said. Significantly the CoR overlooked technological change and material substitution.
Scarcity is essentially a non-issue as far as resource economists are concerned. That’s what markets are for … assuming well-meaning (or not) politicians haven’t tampered with them. Malthus, the CoR, Ehrlich, and peak (fill in your favourite resource) modellers are equally unreliable. They generally make good headlines and increase media circulation. That’s about as far as it goes.
Having trivial arguments about population density is a bit silly without mapping out what percentage of the globe is either uninhabitable, barely habitable or poorly habitable.
Canada is sparsely populated because vast tracts of it are too cold to allow high density populations to survive without importing food. Unless you have some permanent wealth to trade, risking starvation seems a pretty stupid reason for 10 million people to invade the lands of the Inuit.
Siberia east of the Urals is similar. Yes there is a short growing season, yes some people can live there, but it will never be the density of Shanghai, California or London. The area referred to is vast.
Australia will always be limited to high density populations on the Eastern and South-Eastern seaboards. Much of its interior is desert which can happily support only a small itinerant population. Currently.
Ditto with the Sahara desert.
The only thing about population is whether it can support itself. If the world suddenly gets brilliant at vertical growing ,you may find that cities like London can become semi-autonomous in food. It’d require a construction revolution, but it could happen by 2100. If indoor growing becomes possible in the frozen north, then maybe populations in Canada and Siberia can increase. If water management technology improves, who knows which parts of the world will become bread baskets in future.
The immature thugs who want to stop the poor from breeding should ask what value they add to the world if all they do is work as spies to steal from more intelligent people than them. I would contend they add zero value to humanity. Zero. They are thieves incapable of positive contribution. But they are allowed to breed, are they??
PS> I forgot to add a link. Here is the Google books copy of Scarcity and Growth, for those that are interested:
http://books.google.com.au/books?id=gf-NAQAAQBAJ&dq=inauthor%3A%22Harold%20J.%20Barnett%22&source=gbs_book_other_versions
Although overpopulation was a foundation of the save the earth movement, it is impossible to get a consensus about it, not even a fake one, so it doesn’t get mentioned much. Global warming is a much easier cause to sell.
You must look at the “Low Fertility” version of the spreadsheet http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Excel-Data/EXCEL_FILES/1_Population/WPP2012_POP_F01_1_TOTAL_POPULATION_BOTH_SEXES.XLS , previously called the “Low Band”. It is the only one that has ever been close to accurate. Currently, it has the World peak at about 8.3bn in 2049, probably an overestimate. Thereafter population declines, to about about 6.7 bn by 2100.
When I was born, 1940, world population was 2 billion. Today, 2014, world population has passed 7 billion. I am definitely older than more than 5 billion people on this planet. I expect to be around when world population passes the 8 billion mark predicted for 2020.
Reducing availability or increasing costs of energy will lead to hardship and early death.
Go figure.
MarkW says:
“GregS, I have never met anyone who promotes population growth for growth’s sake, so stop with the silly strawmen.”
GregS did not even mention population growth, so stop with the silly straw men.
The current futility of ever more production of ever more obsolescent material is sapping our resources and our lives. GregS was referring to economic growth, which is more and more dependant on built-in obsolescence.
We have the technology to build durable machines but we do the opposite. How much more could we advance our standard of living if we did not have the buy the same thing year after year?
The current system keeps us like hamsters in treadmill, madly running day after day consuming more and more resources to stay exactly where we are.
Cheyne Gordon says:
January 5, 2014 at 3:34 pm
So the world is not overpopulated: I’m sure the 300 million women who have no access to family planning will feel a lot better when you tell them that.
Family planning remains the most cost-effective technology we have for reducing poverty.
So the world can produce much more food? Tell that to the elephant, orang-utan and tiger. I’m sure they will happily give up their habitats for you to grow more food.
Take a walk through the slums of Africa or Asia, and then tell me again that the world is not over-populated.
///////////////////////////////////////////////
Cheyne, FYI: Zeal NEVER beats knowledge.
What you are stating is just another fallacy in a fallacy: Rain forest is being destroyed, BECAUSE everyone is using palm-oil as a substitute (bio-diesel) for fossil fuels and raw material for the chemical industry – quote:
“Facts about palm oil and rainforests
Palm oil is an edible plant oil which has become a common ingredient in many consumer products. Today, around 50 percent of the goods we use every day contain palm oil, from processed foods to candles, grooming products and “biofuels”. Read on for more information on why palm oil has become so pervasive, and how it is destroying rainforests.”
http://www.rainforest-rescue.org/topics/palm-oil
and
“Orangutans and oil palm plantations
Hanging on – but just barely
Of approximately 11 million hectares of oil palm plantations globally, about 6 million hectares are found in Indonesia1 (in 2006) – and counting. But in many places, these plantations are taking over rainforests, the natural habitat of endangered species such as orangutans.”
http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/about_forests/deforestation/forest_conversion_agriculture/orang_utans_palm_oil/
I could go on for HOURS like this. So please tell me, what your excuse for your own zeal-induced blindness is. Is it, perhaps, white man’s guilt?
http://de.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=white%20man%27s%20guilt
Or, rather, post-colonial guilt?
http://www.academia.edu/3615182/Postcolonial_guilt_and_national_identity_Historical_injustice_and_the_Australian_settler_state
Make your choice.
Greg Goodman says:
“The current system keeps us like hamsters in treadmill, madly running day after day consuming more and more resources to stay exactly where we are.”
‘Exactly where we are’?
So you can do without antibiotics? A washer and dryer? Central heat? Electricity?
I would say the current system has a lot to recommend it.
In support of:
phlogiston says:
January 5, 2014 at 7:09 pm
China’s one child policy has some positive consequences:
– The attention that children receive from parents and grandparents is very high – this is good for children’s psychological wellbeing;
– Only the very rich can afford multliple children. This is a kind of eugenics improving the intelligence of the population, even if only slightly. Politically naughty but maybe beneficial.
These factors may explain some of China’s spectacular success in improving its people’s standard of living. Siblings are over-rated.
William:
The assertion/statements (people make statements without supporting logic and facts) above for an increase in population; leading to a better brighter world are not supported by the facts and/or by logic. We must compete with Asia and particularly with China for jobs and for resources. We are losing. The solution is to our problems is not an increase in population of the world. Our problems are more complicated than that. The Developed countries are spending is not sustainable. They are spending more than they take in taxes and the developed countries have started to print money. That road leads in every case in the past has lead to currency collapse, riots, and wars. We are heading for an economic war with China as certainly as winter follows summer. The most recent issue of the Economist layed out the parallels with the rise of power of China and the ambitions of China and the conditions that lead to the First World War.
http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300190526
When the Money Runs Out, The End of Western Affluence
In order for an increased in population to result in more demand, the children born into a country must finish high school, must have a work ethic, and must get a job. That is not the case for many children born in the developed world. China can make rules, does make rules, and can enforce rules; that gives China a competitive advantage over the US and the other developed countries. (See loss of 30% of the US manufacturing jobs above.)
In the Developed countries on the other hand we have incentives for the poor (those how cannot afford to raise their children and that do not have a stable household in which to raise their children) to have more children and the rich to have no children (The more affluent Americans are so busy making money they do not have time to get married and/or do not care to have children. The lack of children in stable economically sound families is a problem.) The more children a single mother has the more subsidies the mother receives (the subsidies/per single family household are twice the average salary of an American family) and the more likely it is that the children and mother are on welfare and/or have problems with the children such as drugs, gangs, and drugs. (No surprise there.)
http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/the-number-of-children-living-in-single-parent-homes-has-nearly-doubled-in/
The number of US children living in single-parent homes has nearly doubled in 50 years: Census data
Today, one-third of American children – a total of 15 million – are being raised without a father. Nearly five million more children live without a mother. Vincent DiCaro, vice president of the National Fatherhood Initiative, blames this trend for many of society’s ills. He claims the way to deal with poverty, drugs, crime and other hot-button cultural issues is to strengthen the two-parent family. Deal with absent fathers, he says, and the rest follows. A growing number of studies show that fatherlessness has a major negative impact on the social and emotional development of children.
The world is not overpopulated. If Alaska had the population density of Hong Kong, you can put all 7 billion people in it and still have a vacant space the size of Texas and the rest of the world will be uninhabited. There are more cows than humans by weight and they eat more food and drink more water than all 7 billion people on earth. The world has too many cows.
Why not read some von Mises? See http://mises.org/books/humanaction.pdf
Human Action p. 668
“Nonhuman beings are entirely subject to the operation of the biological saw
described by Malthus. For them the statement that their numbers tend to
encroach upon the means of subsistence and that the supernumerary specimens
are weeded out by want of sustenance is valid without any exception…. But the case is different with man. Man integrates the satisfaction of the purely zoological impulses, common to
all animals, into a scale of values, in which a place is also assigned to specifically
human ends… Man does not blindly submit to a sexual stimulation like a bull; he refrains from copulation if he deems the costs—the anticipated disadvantages—too high… Rationalization of sexual intercourse already involves the rationalization of proliferation. Then later further methods of rationalizing the increase of progeny were adopted which were independent of abstention from copulation…In the last hundred years the technique of contraceptive devices has been perfected and the frequency of their employment increased considerably”
Human Action p. 136
“Labor is more scarce than material factors of production. We are not dealing at this point
with the problem of optimum population. We are dealing only with the fact
that there are material factors of production which remain unused because
the labor required is needed for the satisfaction of more urgent needs. In our
world there is no abundance, but a shortage of manpower, and there are
unused material factors of production, i.e. land, mineral deposits, and even
plants and equipment.”
>William Astley says:
>We must compete with Asia and particularly with China for jobs and for resources… We are heading for an economic war with China as certainly as winter follows summer
I don’t understand this mindset. Do you also worry about competing with your neighboring state, neighboring city, or your neighbor? If your neighbor is impoverished, have you “won”?
>When the Money Runs Out, The End of Western Affluence
A better title would be “When Other People’s Money Runs Out, The End of Socialism”
> that gives China a competitive advantage over the US and the other developed countries.
Perhaps. Yet US will still have a comparative advantage. See the Ricardian Law of Comparative Advantage.
>See loss of 30% of the US manufacturing jobs above.
US has also lost most of its agricultural jobs – few people are farmers. Yet, Americans still eat.
>A growing number of studies show that fatherlessness has a major negative impact on the social and emotional development of children.
Women do not often need fathers for their children when they have tools to put the men into slavery (“child support”) and steal money from entirely unrelated third parties (“welfare”).
Rhys Jaggar, bad choice using Canada as an example, since some of us regulars live here.
In fact, the habitable portion of Canada, say the main Provinces, are not even at 1% of their potential. This land could easily support 100x the population without encroaching into the Arctic regions. Even if you drew the line at, say, where Edmonton is, you’re looking at a 50 fold increase possible, with the only problem being the fact that immigrants tend to not be good at handling the cold (Edmonton is the farthest north major city in North America).
And if you round the population down to make the math easier, 30 million times 50 is 1.5 billion, in the habitable zone that current has the majority of the population and has a growing season long enough to grow significant food.
Tim Ball:
Thankyou for a very fine article. It summarises truth which has often been said but needs constant repetition because it refutes falsehood which is constantly promoted.
The Malthusian idea wrongly assumes that humans are constrained like bacteria in a Petri dish: i.e. population expands until available resources are consumed when population collapses. The assumption is wrong because humans do not suffer such constraint: humans find and/or create new and alternative resources when existing resources become scarce.
The obvious example is food.
In the 1970s the Club of Rome predicted that human population would have collapsed from starvation by now. But human population has continued to rise and there are fewer starving people now than in the 1970s; n.b. there are less starving people in total and not merely fewer in in percentage.
Now – as seen in this thread – the most common Malthusian assertion is ‘peak oil’. But humans need energy supply and oil is only one source of energy supply. Adoption of natural gas displaces some requirement for oil, fracking increases available oil supply at acceptable cost; etc..
In the real world, for all practical purposes there are no “physical” limits to natural resources so every natural resource can be considered to be infinite; i.e. the human ‘Petri dish’ can be considered as being unbounded. This a matter of basic economics which I explain as follows.
Humans do not run out of anything although they can suffer local and/or temporary shortages of anything. The usage of a resource may “peak” then decline, but the usage does not peak because of exhaustion of the resource (e.g. flint, antler bone and bronze each “peaked” long ago but still exist in large amounts).
A resource is cheap (in time, money and effort) to obtain when it is in abundant supply. But “low-hanging fruit are picked first”, so the cost of obtaining the resource increases with time. Nobody bothers to seek an alternative to a resource when it is cheap.
But the cost of obtaining an adequate supply of a resource increases with time and, eventually, it becomes worthwhile to look for
(a) alternative sources of the resource
and
(b) alternatives to the resource.
And alternatives to the resource often prove to have advantages.
For example, both (a) and (b) apply in the case of crude oil.
Many alternative sources have been found. These include opening of new oil fields by use of new technologies (e.g. to obtain oil from beneath sea bed) and synthesising crude oil from other substances (e.g. tar sands, natural gas and coal). Indeed, since 1994 it has been possible to provide synthetic crude oil from coal at competitive cost with natural crude oil and this constrains the maximum true cost of crude.
Alternatives to oil as a transport fuel are possible. Oil was the transport fuel of military submarines for decades but uranium is now their fuel of choice.
There is sufficient coal to provide synthetic crude oil for at least the next 300 years. Hay to feed horses was the major transport fuel 300 years ago and ‘peak hay’ was feared in the nineteenth century, but availability of hay is not significant a significant consideration for transportation today. Nobody can know what – if any – demand for crude oil will exist 300 years in the future.
Indeed, coal also demonstrates an ‘expanding Petri dish’.
Spoil heaps from old coal mines contain much coal that could not be usefully extracted from the spoil when the mines were operational. Now, modern technology enables the extraction from the spoil at a cost which is economic now and would have been economic if it had been available when the spoil was dumped.
These principles not only enable growing human population: they also increase human well-being.
The ingenuity which increases availability of resources also provides additional usefulness to the resources. For example, abundant energy supply and technologies to use it have freed people from the constraints of ‘renewable’ energy and the need for the power of muscles provided by slaves and animals. Malthusians are blind to this obvious truth; for example, Greg Goodman says at January 6, 2014 at 12:28 am
And, of course, his assertion is blatantly untrue: the “current system” has freed humans from the need for slaves to operate treadmills, the oars of galleys, etc..
The Malthusian idea is wrong because it ignores basic economics and applies a wrong model; human population is NOT constrained by resources like the population of bacteria in a Petri dish.
Richard